Partners say they aren't necessarily worried about Dell EMC losing its position as storage market kingpin, but aggressive, innovative competitors like Pure Storage and NetApp are beginning to appear larger in the rearview mirror.

Veritas Vision sees the introduction of Veritas Cloud Storage, a software-defined storage offering for storing and managing billions of files, and Veritas Access Appliance for easy scale up and scale out of capacity.

The new Qumulo File Fabric, or QF2, scales over a billion files, large and small, between on-premises and cloud infrastructure with full management of and visibility into the data, and is now ready for use with Amazon Web Services.

It's been a year since Dell engineered the landmark $58 billion acquisition of data storage giant EMC, and through the first half of its first full fiscal year, the results have beaten forecasts, Dell said.

Outside of his VMworld keynote presentation, Michael Dell used a couple of question-and-answer sessions to talk about how he views Dell Technologies' and VMware's position in the cloud, in partnerships and in ecosystems that include competitors.

Over the next few quarters, the company will hire storage specialists across its go-to-market segments, global specialty teams and channel teams, says Infrastructure Solutions Group President David Goulden.